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One hundred years ago, on Monday 30th June 1919, the day after Prime Minister David Lloyd George returned to London having signed the Versailles Treaty, the Liverpool Courier carried the article below from his wife Dame Margaret Lloyd George, its message being reported widely in the Press. On the Saturday she had presided over the massive London women’s Victory Loan demonstration in Trafalgar Square, supported by Mrs Pankhurst and others. Ahead were the Peace Day celebrations due for 19th July. Dame Margaret is greatly under-appreciated, not only for tirelessly canvassing support for Liberalism, for her husband and for his Coalition government but also for the gentle, subtle and energetic ways in which she promoted her own causes. Perhaps most consistently she was a champion for opportunities for women in a man’s world. The article is written in her familiar style, with the simple opening: ‘Women have at least two substantial reasons for rejoicing in the establishment of peace on earth’.

‘War is absolutely alien to woman’s nature and does violence to everything that she cherishes in life. Woman’s thoughts are thoughts of peace, and to her war is an unspeakable torture, an indescribable agony. Woman is so constituted that peace is essential to her wellbeing and the return of peace she therefore hails with joy unfeigned.

‘She can rejoice, too, because she has contributed so magnificently by her endeavours and by her endurance to the great victory which has made peace possible. Though she loves peace and loathes war, yet she laboured with unexampled devotion to end the war. Without women’s help we might have seen the end of the war but we could not have seen the war end in victory for us – victory which crowns the efforts of our valiant men on land, on sea, and in the air. That the enemy has been hoist with his own petard is due in no small degree to woman’s help. In every sphere the women of Britain have undertaken work uncongenial, arduous and often very perilous. If every woman in Britain had received due “recognition” at the hands of the state the Honours List would be almost as long as the Directory’.

‘Nor must we forget the women whose part in the tragic struggle was to suffer in silence, and today are longing for “the touch of the vanished hand” and for “the sound of the voice that is still”. “They also serve who stand and wait”. They have mourned; they have never murmured. Throughout the whole of the long dark night (and how dark the night we have passed through we do not even yet realise) there was one star that shone brightly, clearly, constantly. The spirit of the people never failed us, not even flickered. It was a phenomenon without parallel in the history of this land, and unexcelled in any other land at any time’.

‘If we can for the purpose of peace retain that spirit of unity, the Peace day will mark not only the end of the war, but the end of one and the beginning of another era in the history of Britain, an era brighter and better than Britain has ever known in her long history; and the inauguration of that era will be the richest compensation for all the sacrifices of the war. We have an unexampled opportunity and responsibility’.

Dame Margaret does not waste words. She writes straight to the point. She does not pull any punches. There is a total absence of sentimentality. You could not hope for a clearer tribute to the contribution of women during that dreadful war.

Sadly that “war to end all wars” did nothing of the sort and the peace that was signed was flawed, the allies arguing between squeezing Germany “till the pips squeaked” to granting less crippling terms. The World War Two settlement was more successful, learning from the past. May we never underestimate how, since 1945, the degree to which most Europeans have enjoyed peace in their time.

Dame Margaret’s typed copy of this article now makes part of the J.T. Rhys Collection, a new archive available at the National Library of Wales. The Rev. J.T. Rhys, my grandfather, was Dame Margaret’s Private Secretary from 1917 to 1922, whilst she was at No. 10 Downing Street. Her photograph is by Elliot and Fry, copyright National Portrait Gallery.

In 1844, just before the Great Famine hit Ireland, my Irish forebears left for London. All I ever really knew was that, on arrival, the 5 year old Cathy, my great grandmother, asked “Is that the same moon as we have in Ireland?”… a story that was passed down over the years. Since then I have discovered just what it took to make a new life in London. This latest album is an 11 song cycle retelling their story. If they hadn’t made it, there wouldn’t be a me. Each track starts with a short narrative before the song takes hold.

Moving In

The first 3 songs set the stage: Drop the O’ reminds us that the Irish weren’t popular, even though they virtually built Victorian London – so to help integration the O’Briens became Bryans and the O’Neilles, Neals. As the song says, it isn’t easy being green especially when you’re Irish. In Wherever the Moon Is (my favourite song on the album) Cathy asks her father the big question and like many children’s difficult but simple questions, each answer begs another, as her father seeks to reassure Cathy. The image here is a contemporary painting of the very street they lived in, Lincoln’s Court, later to be replaced by the Peabody Buildings. And in Rookery Rock we are reminded that their new home was the worst area of Dickensian London, close to the St Giles Rookery, often called Little Dublin or a variation thereof. And I tell the story of their near-neighbour Ellen Donovan who lost her life trying to save children in the overcrowded firetrap where they lived, Lincoln Court. Ellen is commemorated in a plaque in Postman’s Park, Little Britain, near St Paul’s Cathedral, which honours the people’s heroes of the time.

Settling In

The next three songs see my great grandparents, Cathy O’Neill and Charles O’Brien meeting, marrying, and starting a family – opening with the saddest song, Cathy Met Charlie. My father told me his father was one of four children, along with his two sisters and a brother. Actually there were twelve, but eight died either within a week of birth or didn’t make it beyond five years old. The font where they were christened is still there and is in the video. But Charlie got himself a job as a street seller of fruit and vegetables – they did live close to Covent Garden after all – as I sing in The Costermonger’s Song. And the next song celebrates the work of the Irish labourer (Cathy’s father, a linen weaver in Ireland, may have been one of them) as they built Victorian London, in Building Boomers.

Was It Worth It?

But it clearly was really tough. I was stunned when I found in a book the drawings of the firegrates of the very houses my family lived in: the old Georgian houses, No’s 6 and 7 Wild Court, grand in their day – and the only houses in the terrace for which any detail was recorded. These houses were very crowded, and were demolished in the early 1880s. The street, Wild Court, is still there, running West off Kingsway, Holborn. Just as amazing was discovering that this Georgian terrace was recorded for posterity by an artist, complete with costermongers’ carts, before it was demolished – see painting above. It made me think what Charlie and Cathy may have thought, looking at those firegrates, as they tried to Make It Worth It.

New Job, Two Weddings and a New Home

But make it they did. Step One, in Hold the Front Page, was for Charlie and Cathy’s son Charlie, my grandfather, to get work in Fleet Street, as a compositor at the Pall Mall Gazette (now part of the Evening Standard). Step Two, in At the Double, was to marry Londoners, which they did in a double marriage when Charlie and his sister Ellen O’Brien married the sister and brother Louisa and Tom Banan … a family from Sussex and possibly from Huguenot weaver families. And Step Three, to get a better home, in the new Victorian garden city of Noel Park in Wood Green, where my father was born and where the ageing Cathy reflects on their lives in Come Into the Garden.

Great Unanswered Question 2: What is the Eagles song Hotel California all about?

I’ve cracked the code: Just read these lyrics, to the tune if you remember it……….. the bold words are all that I have had to change for it all to make sense!! I’ve posted someone else’s Youtube version of the original with original lyrics at the end. Enjoy!! Welcome to the Hotel May Theresa!!

On a dark Dover highway, hands running through my hair

Warm smell of fajitas, coming from God knows where

Up ahead in the distance, I saw a red tail light

The lorries lined up, nowhere to go

I had to stop for the night

There she stood in the doorway

Heard the Division bell

And I was thinking to myself

‘This isn’t heaven, looks like Hell’

Then she lit up a candle, promised she knew the way

There were voices down the corridor

I thought I heard them say

Welcome to the Hotel May Theresa

Keep a straight face (keep a straight face)

I know it’s a waste

Doom and gloom at the Hotel May Theresa

Any time of year (any time of year) nothing to fear

Her mind you know it’s not twisted, won’t drive a Mercedes Benz

She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys, that she calls friends

How they dance in the Commons, Brexiters don’t sweat

Some dance the Remainer, some dance to forget

So I called up the Juncker

“Please listen this time”

He said “we haven’t heard that one before at least since half past nine”

Now you know what the song was about!! I did warn you before the referendum – see my blog of 7th June 2016, Check out time? Think again. Vote Remain, complete with The Eagles’s great punchline. I stand by every word I wrote then.

On March 15th 1927, 91 years ago, the first women’s boat race between Oxford and Cambridge took place on the Isis at Oxford. It was Boats for Women as well as Votes for Women. Margaret Teify Rhys, my aunt, known as Tiffy, coxed the Cambridge eight and in a forthright interview in March 1989 recalled the controversies and the highs and the lows of that time. On this first occasion Cambridge was represented by the the Newnham College boat, before other women’s colleges had begun rowing. The interview by Alana Martin was broadcast on BBC Woman’s Hour to mark the first time that both men’s boats were coxed by a woman.

You won’t be surprised eyebrows were raised at the idea of women taking part at all. You may have heard about the mismanagement and mix up over the rules. They tried to keep it quiet, racing at 1.15 hoping that everyone would be at lunch. I hope you will be entertained.

This blog introduces the video of Audition blues, the second song on my first album, I know a little place. Whilst it is inevitable that songs are influenced by the writer’s own life, I owe it my parents, family and teachers to confess that the first verse of my song is untrue – everyone encouraged me to keep asking questions, to understand what life may be about – even if there can be no definitive answer. I don’t remember ever being just told “because”. I was told, never be afraid to ask.

The circle of life

Curiously, the first image I chose for the song happened to be a photo I took of the first carving in the circle of life series from the Toshogo shrine in Nikko, Japan of the mother and her child – the mother looking to the future and the child looking with trust and perhaps for answers. The next appropriate image for me is one of those wonderful open tree-lined roads in France, followed quite naturally by Le Penseur from the Musée Rodin in Paris, concluding with the almost endless beach at Le Touquet-Paris-Plage.

Mother and child

En route in France

Le Penseur, Musee Rodin, Paris

Le Touquet-Paris-Plage

What now, what’s next?

The song, illustrated by some pilgrims in India streaming along the road in their bright yellow saris, alludes to the idea that life can be one audition after another, and to the idea of an afterlife “if we pass the audition, what’s the next part we play?”. Do we get a second chance? – “if we turn out a failure, can we re-audition someday?” I will never know if the man in his red shirt whom I photographed high in a tree knew what he was doing or somehow had just taken a wrong turning!

Pilgrims, South India

Man up a tree

Do we write for our audience or ourselves?

Then a little dig at the X Factor culture “when they see what they want will they know it” – in this video I went back to Shinto shrine in Nikko for the three monkeys who capture for me the idea of going before a judging panel. This 17th century wooden carving is the origin of the “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil” proverb, the monkeys being Kikazaru, Iwazaru and Mizasru. How important is the verdict of the judging panel? Do we write for our audience or for ourselves? Selfishly I write first for my own pleasure – whilst there is great satisfaction if I get the bonus of others liking my work too! I am very happy that a friend told me he plays it a lot because of the meaning it holds for him.

Kikazaru, Iwazaru and Mizaru, Hear no evil, Speak no evil, See no evil

Go with the flow

The images then indulge in a little poetic or visual licence, as the “river with rapids” and the “canyon with multiple bends” are accompanied by the peace and tranquility of the wonderful backwaters of Kerala in India and the elegant, graceful and dramatic Chinese fishing nets of Cochin (reported to be disappearing). As I wrote the song I confess that the image in my mind was of the (once mighty?) Colorado River running through the Grand Canyon to the Pacific Ocean – but I haven’t got good photos of that!

Cochin sunset

Backwaters of Kerala

And the reason for living is…..?

So if you want to know the reason for living, well up to a point you will have to work it out for yourself. For me it lies in other people who I love and whose company I enjoy. It lies in the wonderful colours and sights of the world. It lies in the ups and downs of life and in the thrill of the chase often made greater by the effort it takes to succeed. And it lies, most definitely, in words, pictures and music. Write no evil, draw no evil and sing no evil?

You can’t sit out the dance

For this little homily song on our journey through life, I have chosen a few pictures from my own travels. This song niggles at me whenever I’d rather hide away from the world, trying to “sit out the dance”. Perhaps subconsciously we write about the challenges we know from experience are hard to meet. Having spent much of my working life helping people deal with the future, it’s always been worth remembering that whatever the future, or present, you have to work with it. That way you also have a chance of shaping it! It’s not the first song I’ve written that has made me think I should practice what I preach!

Decisions, decisions

So we start with an obvious train-track image setting out clearly the long journey ahead: but I just love the chap standing bang in the middle of the tracks as if he is wondering what to do next – well, he is on the phone to someone trying to find out perhaps. Of course the alternative could be to take the road on the left….

Some like to know where they’re heading

Some rather just leave it to chance

But however you tackle the future

You know you can’t sit out the dance

Rich or poor, you still have to play the game

Whoever you are, you still have to play the game you are in.

It may be a ball, with champagne on ice

It may be a barn dance, with the straw and the mice

Whatever your fancy, whatever your home

You can’t sit out the dance

Life keeps you jumping

I love this photo of the boys playing cricket on the endless beach of Chennai, India. Wherever the ball goes or is coming from you have to play the game. Though sometimes when you are young you are directed where to go, like these Japanese schoolchildren.

Life keeps you jumping, rest when you can

Between boredom and surprises, between dry toast and jam

Keep smiling and look forward, celebrate and applaud

All those who keep dancing, sweet lady, sweet lord

The dance of life follows many rhythms

You can be on your toes, you can wallow in the mud, but you are still in the dance.

This is the first of a series of blogs I will be doing in the coming months to introduce brand new videos for I know a little place, the first of my three albums. Songs conjure up images in the mind of writer and of listener. Here I have curated my own selection of wonderful images that have surprised me with their appropriateness for the lyrics. For me both lyrics and these artworks are depicting similar sentiments – even though I may being seeing something different in the Art from that intended by their great creators. I hope you enjoy listening to this first song, Take it as it comes, in the company of the talent of fourteen great European artists stretching across five centuries.

“All this will be ashes….”

My opening line “There will come a time when all this will be ashes” is more doom laden than I ever meant. To the rescue, Jacques Tissot’s 1868 depiction of Paris society in Le Cercle de la Rue Royale, sums up the idea that however smart we think we are, we won’t go on for ever. Then Lawrence Alma–Tadema’s 1887 Women of Amphissa couldn’t be a better vision of passion spent. Next, Henri Gustave Jossot‘s 1894 series Artistes et Bourgeois satirises intellectual pretensions, as one asks “And your next book?” and the other replies “Oh, becoming simply Shakespearian!” We are finally rescued from our musing as Brandenburgian Jacob Phillip Hackert’s fireworks explode Rome’s Castel Sant’ Angelo and allow us to celebrate, as they still do today.

Our transient life, with Tissot, Alma-Tadema, Jossot, and Hackert

“But until that time, keep an open mind….”

But we still search for knowledge. In La Tache Noire (or The Black Stain) Albert Bettannier, a French teacher tells his charges of the terrible loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Prussia in 1871. Then Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s depiction, of the trance-like spiritual transfiguration of Beatrix Portinari at the moment of her death, uncannily matches my words “when you see beyond” – though I wasn’t thinking of death particularly, but perhaps more the moment of insight, as in Joseph Wright of Derby’s “The Alchymist, In Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers”. At this point Gabriel von Max’s book-reading simian is just the ticket to keep our feet on the ground – “but until that time, keep an open mind”.

“When time passes slowly….”

Verse three starts with the woman in the window spinning yarn, a good task to accompany reflection – by another artist from the Franco-German borderland of Alsace, René-Paul Schützenberger. British painter John William Waterhouse’s moody young man in red depicts the Roman Emperor Nero reflecting on matricide. In the next frame there is more family trouble: I saw this stunning painting by Évariste Vital Luminais last summer in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Quimper, Brittany – King Gradlon on the white horse is trying to save his daughter from drowning, not knowing she has become an evil woman – her death at least calms the seas. The final artwork, The Travelling Companions, by the wonderfully named Augustus Leopold Egg, now in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, allows us to relax with our favourite book on our train journey through life, or even fall asleep to the dulcet sounds of my harmonica – whatever, “take it as it comes”!

The short and the long of it, with Schutzenberger, Waterhouse, Luminais and Egg

“Breathe the air around you………….”

After the musical interlude we can drift reflectively through the successive images of my own shadow in the Dordogne sun, of another Rossetti beauty struggling to raise a smile in the sun, of Shakespeare’s Shrew Katherina, (by Edward Robert Hughes), thinking what to do when she is not being given food. Finally, staying in thespian company at table, we spy on Mr and Mrs David Garrick enjoying tea in the open air at “Garrick’s Villa” by the Thames at Hampton, by Johann Zoffany. “Breathe the air around you, take it as it comes”.

The contrasts of life, with Hablik, von Ehren, Biva and Hilliard

And relax with the coda: “take it as it comes”

The song finally closes as Charles Bargue‘s black dog and a white parrot play their own game of chess, the liveried footman paying no heed, as Etienne-Prosper Berne-Bellecour’s Normandy shepherdess calmly “takes it as it comes” in the fading light, and as Johann Tischbein’s Goethe reflects on the Roman campagna.

Take it as it comes with Bargue, Bellecour and Tischbein

Art enhances music

For myself, this song now has many new dimensions in breadth and depth. If you had asked me to write a song to fit the paintings I’d never have got there – albeit just a hypothesis as I doubt if these nineteen images would ever have appeared together. It’s been like curating my own art exhibition around a theme, with help from the internet, Wikipedia etc, giving us access to all these public domain images from around the world. I’ve learnt more about art and have gained new insights on my own songs!